Requiring patients to endure suffering is cruel, and keeping someone alive who doesn’t want to be is a waste.

We’re taught early that ending one’s own life is an act of insanity, that mere thoughts of suicide are grounds for a mental health intervention. Killing yourself, we’re told, is the coward’s way out. Toss in religious taboos and it all makes rational discussion of self-administered death elusive.

Yet it’s a debate that must happen if we’re to give terminally ill patients any hope of controlling when and how they die. For those who are chronically ill and suffering unbearable pain, choosing one’s own end should be a fundamental human right. Certainly, anyone who believes in limited government can get behind this idea.

That’s the crux of Assemblyman Jon Burzichelli’s argument, as he tries to make New Jersey the fifth state to legalize physician-assisted suicide for terminally ill patients.

The Gloucester County Democrat’s bill — the Death with Dignity Act — made it through an Assembly committee last year, but stalled in the Senate. So Burzichelli reintroduced his bill last month. He wants the debate to keep going, even if its chances to become law under Gov. Chris Christie, who opposes assisted suicide, are small.

Burzichelli’s proposal, modeled after laws in Oregon and Washington, provides layers of protections: A doctor must certify the patient has less than six months to live, is acting voluntarily and capable of end-of-life decisions. The patient must make two requests for life-ending drugs, 15 days apart, and administer them without any help.

Critics of assisted suicide laws fear sickly, vulnerable patients will be pressured to choose suicide to avoid burdening their families with expensive end-of-life care. But that hasn’t happened. Instead, studies found that most who ask for the drugs were well-educated, financially secure and chose suicide as a way to control their own deaths. In Oregon and Washington, a third of those who filled the prescription died without using it.

Burzichelli’s advocacy on assisted suicide has been slow and deliberate, but heartfelt. The lawmaker’s sister-in-law testified for the bill at a legislative hearing last year, three months before dying of cancer.

Laws requiring patients to endure suffering are cruel. And keeping someone alive who doesn’t want to be is a waste of money — resources that could be used to support hospice care, or patients who want life-prolonging treatment.

The Death with Dignity Act removes government from an intensely personal decision, while providing safeguards to ensure that incurable patients are making uncoerced, rational decisions. Then it frees doctors to help patients end their lives painlessly, by choosing a peaceful, dignified death — not one brought on by a gun or a handful of barbiturates.